"The West is facing a concerted effort by Islamic jihadists, the motives and goals of whom are largely ignored by the Western media, to destroy the West and bring it forcibly into the Islamic world -- and to commit violence to that end even while their overall goal remains out of reach. That effort goes under the general rubric of jihad."-- Robert Spencer

Sunday, May 22, 2005

Anarchy in the U.K.

Muslim protesters today called for the bombing of New York in a demonstration outside the US embassy in London.

There were threats of "another 9/11" from militants angry at reports of the desecration of the Koran by US troops in Iraq.

Some among the crowd burned an effigy of Tony Blair on a crucifix and then set fire to a Union flag and a Stars and Stripes.

Led by a man on a megaphone, they chanted, "USA watch your back, Osama is coming back" and "Kill, kill USA, kill, kill George Bush". A small detail of police watched as they shouted: "Bomb, bomb New York" and "George Bush, you will pay, with your blood, with your head."

Note that this took place directly after Friday prayers. LGF has some postively medieval pictures.

A central London rally organized by the British Palestine Solidarity Campaign on Saturday heard Respect Party MP George Galloway advocate a general boycott of Israel, as well as other speeches calling for Israel's destruction.

Andrew Birgin, of the Stop the War Coalition, urged the destruction of the State of Israel. "Israel is a racist state! It is an apartheid state! With its Apache helicopters and its F-16 fighter jets! The South African apartheid state never inflicted the sort of repression that Israel is inflicting on the Palestinians," he said to loud applause. "When there is real democracy, there will be no more Israel!" concluded Birgin. "Allahu Akbar!" yelled several men repeatedly in response.

Consider these events against the backdrop of a recent British ruling that grants Muslim girls the "right" to attend school in a burlap sack. Theodore Dalrymple writes in the National Review:

In the long annals of judicial stupidity, there can rarely have been a more idiotic judgment than that recently given by Lord Justice Brooke of the British Court of Appeal. It reads like the suicide note not of a country alone, but of an entire civilization.

A young Muslim girl, Shabina Begum, who attended a state school in Luton, England, four-fifths of whose pupils were Muslim, started a legal battle when she was 13 to be allowed the jilbab, a form of dress that leaves only her face and hands exposed. She was almost certainly put up to this by her older brother, a supporter of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a Muslim party [ed. note: terrorist group] that seeks to establish a Muslim world state, that believes democracy is blasphemy, and that denies that the Western citizenship of Muslims is real or meaningful, or confers any privileges or imposes any duties.

Eventually she brought a case, supported and possibly funded by the Hizb ut-Tahrir, under the U.K.’s Human Rights Act. She claimed that the school was denying her right to an education. She lost the case, and also an appeal, but won at the last hurdle. The Guardian reported that after her victory, she said she “could scream with happiness.”

When they heard of her victory, many Muslim women around the country must have wanted to scream with quite different emotions, despair and rage prominent among them. For Lord Justice Brooke’s ruling, that Shabina Begum’s human rights had been denied, and that she had been discriminated against illegally on religious grounds, displayed a complete and invincible ignorance of the social context of the case. Lord Justice Brooke saw no evil, heard no evil, and felt no evil. In effect, therefore, he was giving succor to those Muslim men who still abuse women in a medieval fashion....The Muslim Council of Britain [the British version of CAIR] welcomed the judge’s ruling as a victory for religious freedom (of precisely the kind that the Hizb ut-Tahrir is dedicated to destroying). . . . One is strongly reminded of Communist tactics: to denigrate and take advantage of freedom at the same time. And having seen that British society is so weak and unwilling to defend itself against an alien culture, the fanatics will next demand that girls at school be allowed on the grounds of religious freedom to cover themselves up even more.

Or the "right" to not go to school at all. The punch line: Shabina Begum was represented by Cherie Blair, wife of Labour Party Prime Minister Tony Blair.